Ultimate Machines

What will the next generation think about our old servers and desktop clunckers?

Years ago, in the days before the Web was
popular, the ultimate machine was equated universally with servers.
These systems had the hottest, fastest CPU(s) one could afford,
obscene amounts of memory (often as much as 64MB of RAM), huge,
fast SCSI hard drives (usually two or three to spread the load) and
were never commodity (Intel) systems—they were DECs, SUN Sparcs,
IBM RS or HP UNIX servers. Back in those days, the big data centers
belonged to Wang and others. Today, most server systems I install
are or can be low-end systems with 1GHz processors, 128MB RAM, 18GB
IDE hard drives that absolutely fly, at least compared to the
clunky MFM or RLL drives of years gone by, and they're still
overkill. Now, more than ever, you're likely to find the ultimate
machine on the boss' desktop. After all, we can't have him or her
waiting ten seconds for Outlook or Netscape to open, and how will
he or she watch CNN while working in the bloated, monstrous word
processor (with 95% of the “features” totally unknown to most
users). Today's graphics cards have more RAM than the first disk
drives I owned had storage space. And computing is only in its
infancy. In a few years we'll look back on today and shake our
heads, wondering how we ever got along with such slow, primitive
systems.

I find it hard to believe I've overlooked reviewing this
particular package because I use it all the time. (All programs in
this column are built from source.) This program is run instead of
make install when installing
packages from source. It builds (albeit crudely) RPMs, DEBs and TGZ
(Slackware) packages. This will help control the cruft on your
system as you install and remove source packages. I even use it on
my Linux from Scratch systems (I install RPM and checkinstall early
on). This is a must-have/must-use for all
systems—production, test, whatever. Requires: bash, glibc.

CRM allows you to track incidents (entities), assign them to
folks for resolution, assign due dates, priorities and so on, then
check up on all the activity. If you're running a service-oriented
business, this particular application will be worth investigating.
You even can set alarms on projects you don't want to extend past
the due date. Easy to install and use. Requires: MySQL, Apache with
PHP and MySQL, web browser.

Many years ago I used to sit around with some friends for
weekends at a time and play games like NATO Division
Commander. I haven't done that in a long time, but this
game brought back memories. I don't have the time now to sit around
all weekend playing war games, and even if I did, my significant
other would likely object. But I can play
LGames anytime, even on sleepless nights, as
long as I keep the volume down. Requires: libSDL_mixer, libSDL,
libpthread, glibc, libm, libdl, libvorbisfile, libvorbis, libogg,
libsmpeg, libartsc, libX11, libXext.

If you like crossword puzzles, this program will provide you
with all the puzzles you could want. You create the board and
provide a list of words, and the program does the rest. What is
needed is a tie-in to a thesaurus so the clue provides synonyms or
definitions rather than the word itself. Documentation is provided
in Spanish (as are dictionaries, etc.), but that's easily remedied.
Requires: libstdc++, libm, glibc, TeX, LaTeX.

If there's one thing users like, it's simple, easy-to-use
tools. But above all, they like graphical tools. The find++ utility
will search your hard drive for words or phrases contained either
in the filename or inside the file. Once a document is found, if
the file type has been associated with a program, you can launch
that program and open the file. It doesn't get much easier than
this. Requires: libgtk, libgdk, libgmodule, libglib, libdl,
libXext, libX11, libm, glibc.

Need to find out where a particular domain name entry is
coming from? This will trace the authoritative information back to
its source. The program has a lot of options for controlling how
the query is run. Requires: glibc.

This month's pick from three years ago wasn't easy, as a
number of good choices are still available, but ippl is probably
the most useful. If you need to keep an eye on the types of traffic
you have, ippl will do that well. It's somewhat improved since
three years ago. Probably the best feature is that you can
configure it easily to log only those protocols in which you're
interested. Its drawback is a lack of support for other than the
standard TCP, UDP, ICMP protocols, but few folks would need this
anyway. Requires: libthread, glibc.

Until next month.

David
A. Bandel
(david@pananix.com)
is a Linux/UNIX consultant currently living in the Republic of
Panama. He is coauthor of Que Special Edition: Using Caldera
OpenLinux.